Montcalm and Wolfe eBook

The country of the New Yorker was New York, and the
country of the Virginian was Virginia. The New
England colonies had once confederated; but, kindred
as they were, they had long ago dropped apart.
William Penn proposed a plan of colonial union wholly
fruitless. James ii. tried to unite all
the northern colonies under one government; but the
attempt came to naught. Each stood aloof, jealously
independent. At rare intervals, under the pressure
of an emergency, some of them would try to act in
concert; and, except in New England, the results had
been most discouraging. Nor was it this segregation
only that unfitted them for war. They were all
subject to popular legislatures, through whom alone
money and men could be raised; and these elective bodies
were sometimes factious and selfish, and not always
either far-sighted or reasonable. Moreover, they
were in a state of ceaseless friction with their governors,
who represented the king, or, what was worse, the feudal
proprietary. These disputes, though varying in
intensity, were found everywhere except in the two
small colonies which chose their own governors; and
they were premonitions of the movement towards independence
which ended in the war of Revolution. The occasion
of difference mattered little. Active or latent,
the quarrel was always present. In New York it
turned on a question of the governor’s salary;
in Pennsylvania on the taxation of the proprietary
estates; in Virginia on a fee exacted for the issue
of land patents. It was sure to arise whenever
some public crisis gave the representatives of the
people an opportunity of extorting concessions from
the representative of the Crown, or gave the representative
of the Crown an opportunity to gain a point for prerogative.
That is to say, the time when action was most needed
was the time chosen for obstructing it.

In Canada there was no popular legislature to embarrass
the central power. The people, like an army,
obeyed the word of command,—­a military
advantage beyond all price.

Divided in government; divided in origin, feelings,
and principles; jealous of each other, jealous of
the Crown; the people at war with the executive, and,
by the fermentation of internal politics, blinded to
an outward danger that seemed remote and vague,—­such
were the conditions under which the British colonies
drifted into a war that was to decide the fate of
the continent.

This war was the strife of a united and concentred
few against a divided and discordant many. It
was the strife, too, of the past against the future;
of the old against the new; of moral and intellectual
torpor against moral and intellectual life; of barren
absolutism against a liberty, crude, incoherent, and
chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality.